A new Chron Eye: Clyde Smith Jr.
Another convicted murderer is headed to the Texas death chamber today, and that means it's time for another edition of Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, in which journalistic ethics the political preferences of editor Jeff Cohen and wife Kathryn Kase concerns of journalistic balance dictate sympathetic portrayals of death-row killer guys.
Today, we learn that the latest death row killer guy had a troubled childhood, a favorite theme when the reporter is unable to find any real redeeming qualities of the death row killer (such as, for example, composition of poetry in prison):
No one from Smith's family will attend. He won't let them.
"He divorced me and he denied me, and I don't have no child, it look like," said his mother, Ruth Maye, who never visited her son in prison.
Maye said she and other family members in Mississippi had planned to go to the execution to see Smith "one last time," and claim his body — which he signed away to an unnamed friend.
Smith, who ran away at age 15, told police he would rather be in jail than in his mother's house.
Maye said she was a good mother to a stubborn child who wouldn't listen to her and got in with the wrong crowd.
"I don't know what happened to him," Maye said.
But according to affidavits filed by some of Smith's five siblings — only two of whom had the same father — Smith, who was no stranger to drugs and alcohol, ran away to escape excessive beatings by both his mother and the five men she married and divorced as they were growing up.
Didn't stay put for long
After spending time on the streets and at a boy's home, Smith moved back to Houston, where he had lived until he was 9, to live with his father, Clyde Smith. His mother warned him that "there ain't nothing left in Texas but death."
Smith's father turned him away, and Jacobs and Bilton were killed about a year later. Smith was 18 years old at the time. The men were only two of the 86 taxicab and livery drivers murdered while on the job nationwide in 1992.
In the 1980s, 15.1 of every 100,000 taxicab drivers lost their lives to murder. Though the murder rate has dropped since the mid-1990s, when cabs were first equipped with emergency alarms and cameras and could be tracked throughout their city routes, a 2000 report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration revealed that cabdrivers are still 60 times more likely than other workers to be slain on the job.
Smith now says he was only an accessory to the murders and that others pulled the trigger. The three confessions he recorded upon his arrest, he says, were made under pressure from homicide investigators.
Points to violent childhood
While Smith's appellate lawyer does not deny his involvement in the killings, he says his life could have been spared had his trial attorney presented evidence regarding Smith's violent childhood to the jury that sentenced him to death.
"The literature sort of shows that that stuff is important to jurors," attorney F. Clinton Broden said.
"Whether it would've made a difference in this case, I don't know. But he should have had the chance."
In a sworn statement, his trial lawyer said he conducted a complete investigation and found no evidence of any abuse.
But Smith's lawyers have claimed in a string of failed appeals that the trial lawyer's investigation was scant, his client visits infrequent and that he never explained to Smith that his childhood could have helped save his life.
The state rejected Smith's first and most critical appeal, his postconviction writ of habeas corpus, in part because his court-appointed habeas lawyers did not include any evidence that family members would have testified to Smith's history had they been contacted.
By the time Broden obtained that evidence and filed new appeals, it was essentially too late, as higher courts cannot rule on evidence that could have been presented at the state level.
'I did not put you there'
But Assistant District Attorney Lynn Hardaway said it is "highly unlikely" that evidence about his childhood would have spared Smith the death sentence, in light of the overwhelming evidence presented against him.
In contrast, here is the AP's coverage of that aspect of the story (via KHOU-11), which seems sufficient:
In earlier appeals, lawyers pointed out federal judges agreed Smith may have had poor legal help during his trial and that he suffered significant abuse as a child, which they say was not pursued by his trial defense team.
“Nevertheless, ... courts concluded that Smith must shoulder the consequences,” Clint Broden, Smith’s appeals lawyers, said.
[snip]
Smith dropped out of the ninth grade in Laurel, Miss. and once worked as a security guard.
He has four brothers and a sister. From death row, he said the last time he saw a relative was 1991.
He also has a daughter, about 18, who has no contact with him.
“I didn’t want her to be exposed to this,” he said.
Death row killer guy Clyde Smith Jr. will be departing tonight.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/15/06 02:33 PM | Print |
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